U.S. political magazine The New Republic announced today they will be droppings its paywall, offering its online content free to visitors.

A blog post on the magazine’s website wrote: “This decision is in line with our desire to enable new readers to discover and share the best of what TNR’s writers produce each day.”

The post emphasizes visitors will only be able to access current content; the archives will only be available to subscribers. Also, subscribers – digital or print – will be the only ones who can comment on the site.

The Atlantic Wire writes despite its reputation in political circles and its impressive 100-year history, “the magazine has struggled to make money, cutting back ad pages in the paper edition while trying to increase subscribers on the web.”

It would be unreasonable to assume The New Republic made this move to answer the New York Times’ recent decision to restrict access to its online content, but with such strong political content on both sites, it wouldn’t be wrong to suggest the two are competing news outlets.

A new weekly iPad magazine, produced as an app, will soon be released, according to Forbes. The digital magazine called Huffington will come from Huffington Post Media Group and will be overseen by Tim O’Brien, Huffington Post’s executive editor.

As Forbes reports, “Huffington will be published weekly and will reflect the Huffington Post’s mix of original journalism and aggregated news, possibly with a small number of stories commissioned specifically for the magazine.”

It will be designed as an app, and there are reports it will be offered free at first with a paid version in the works. No timetable has yet been set for a launch.

Arianna Huffington is betting on the success of iPad-only digital products, much like News Corp did with The Daily. Since its launch in early 2011, The Daily claims to be one of Apple’s top-grossing iPad apps in the world.

Forbes points out AOL already has a tablet-based magazine-like news product called Editions – it’s a news reader that gets content from a user’s social network.

Huffington was also in the news recently last week: Huffington Post Media Group is preparing to launch a live over-the-internet video channel modeled on the 24-hour cable news networks.

The Daily, an upcoming iPad-only magazine from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, has delayed its launch but already the Web is buzzing with rumours of what this unique media property will look like and how it will function.

Scheduled to launch this Wednesday, The Daily has been delayed for several weeks, or even months, according to media reports. iPad owners will have to wait a bit longer to their hands on the iPad-specific publication created by Murdoch’s News Corp.

But at the very least, hints of The Daily’s looks and function are being revealed on the Web. Damon Kiesow of Poynter.org said he got a sneak peek of the source code of its recently-launched companion website, The Daily.com. The front page is dominated by photos, and Kiesow spotted two headlines that may or may not relate to actual articles: “Oprah’s Biggest Gamble” and “A Bridge Too Favre.”

He also said The Daily may include an embedded video player and “the availability of Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit and Newsvine article sharing options.”

AdAge found out other details: The Daily will include a multi-story front page, but “magazine-style layouts within, as well as graphics that take advantage of the iPad’s capabilities in terms of rotating, pinching and swiping and video culled from News Corp. outlets.”

Ads will also be super-sized. AdAge quotes Porter Gale, VP-marketing at Virgin America, saying: “This will allow us to use images that can be turned around in a 3-D motion and that’s going to make it much more creative and memorable.”

One hundred writers, editors and designers have been hired to work on the project. Subscriptions will cost 99¢ a week after a two-week trial through Apple’s App Store.

Apple’s iPad is the sole device to offer The Daily at launch, although AdAge reports Murdoch is planning to spread The Daily to other tablet devices, such as Android and BlackBerry devices.

Andy Chapman, head of digital trading at WPP’s Mindshare, is optimistic about The Daily’s chances: “This will be a good temperature check for the marketplace for what consumers’ financial threshold is for good content. We’re all waiting to see where the audience gravitates.”